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Abstract

Anxiety and stress-related disorders constitute a large global health burden, but are still poorly understood. Prior work has demonstrated clear impacts of stress upon basic cognitive function: biasing attention towards unexpected and potentially threatening information and instantiating a negative affective bias. However, the impact that these changes have on higher-order, executive, decision-making processes is unclear. In this study we examined the impact of a translational within-subjects stress induction (threat of unpredictable shock) on two well-established executive decision-making biases: the framing effect (N=83), and temporal discounting (N=36). In both studies, we demonstrate a) clear subjective effects of stress, and b) clear executive decision-making biases but c) no impact of stress on these decision-making biases. Indeed, Bayes factor analyses confirmed substantial preference for decision-making models that did not includestress. We posit that while stress may induce subjective mood change and alter low-level perceptual and action processes (Robinson et al., 2013b) , some higher-level executive processes remain unperturbed by these impacts. As such, although stress can induce a transient affective biases and altered mood, these need not result in poor financial decision-making.

Author Comment

This paper has been submitted to another journal.

Additional Information

Competing Interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Author Contributions

Oliver J Robinson conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Rebecca L Bond conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Jonathan P Roiser conceived and designed the experiments, wrote the paper, reviewed drafts of the paper.

Human Ethics

The following information was supplied relating to ethical approvals (i.e., approving body and any reference numbers):

UCL Research Ethics Committee Project ID Number: 1764/001

Data Deposition

The following information was supplied regarding the deposition of related data:

http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1423293

Funding

A Medical Research Council Career Development Award to Oliver J. Robinson (MR/K024280/1) funded this research. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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